Numero Records digs up gems, tales

Ken Shipley's aim is to make available to the public undiscovered recording gems. His Numero Records label is doing just that.

May 08, 2005|By Bob Gendron, Special to the Tribune.

Arrow Brown, a gun-toting R&B impresario, ruled a harem of women who helped fuel his lifestyle by handing over their welfare checks. Tucked away in a South Martin Luther King Drive graystone, he promised fame and fortune to anyone talented who would listen to his spiel. Brown's label, Bandit, produced a slew of killer songs between 1969 and 1981.

Now, Ken Shipley might be crazy, but he's betting his friend's money on the fact that once people hear some of the Bandit output, reissued on Chicago-based Numero Records, they're going to want it. The 27-year-old's imprint doesn't aspire to break the next trend or land a cross-promotional advertising deal. That would be too ordinary and besides, it's been done.

Shipley just wants to bring you undiscovered gems that you didn't know you wanted to own. So far, the label has lived up to its lofty goal, having issued four painstakingly researched albums steeped in stories such as Brown's that would make good fiction, were they not true.

The label's so-called Minister of Information, Shipley got the idea for Numero while working for Rykodisc. While there, Shipley would bring neglected tunes to the attention of label honchos who never expressed interest in putting them out.

Lucky meeting

Then Shipley met Tom Lunt in 2003, while doing some late-night grocery shopping. The pair had met once before but lost touch. After striking up a conversation, they found their meeting fortuitous. Lunt, also a music enthusiast, had recently left his advertising job at DDB Worldwide, and had start-up capital.

Shipley was newly unemployed and armed with a batch of obscure records he wanted to release. A business plan hatched within days.

As record collectors turned off by what they felt to be other reissue labels' blown opportunities and deficiencies, the duo developed a vision that prized quality over quantity.

Believing that others shared his completist viewpoint and would follow a label that established a strong track record, Shipley modeled Numero's series concept off of jazz label Actuel's chronological numbering system.

Numero's founders also realize that listeners have grown tired of ubiquitous "lost treasure" and "hidden gems" compilations that lack a unifying theme, and that often contain second- and third-rate songs that should've remained buried. Rather than treating music as a museum artifact, the label wants to give people an exciting sense of having made a discovery that they would talk to their friends about.

For Shipley, it all boils down to giving those who don't know about and wouldn't be interested in Numero offerings a reason to want to buy them.

"The real challenge is raising the bar, and making the releases interesting enough for people to own every single one," Shipley says. "This year, we'll only do four or five albums because they take a lot of time to do right."

Numero's two most recent releases do just that. "Eccentric Soul: The Bandit Label" collects 20 tracks recorded in Chicago between 1969 and 1981 by Brown's little-known and long-forgotten household operation. While the string-laden R&B varies between good and magnificent, the music is boosted by Brown's surreal saga, which wouldn't have been known if not for Shipley's curiosity being aroused by some crude, hand-drawn images on two Bandit 45s that Numero researcher Rob Sevier had.

None of Bandit's singles dented the charts, yet Brown lived the life of a commune superstar. Magnetic and persuasive, Brown had among his array of talent a singer named Johnny Davis, whose career abruptly ended in 1973 when he mysteriously fell from a 12-story building and was later discovered jammed in a trash receptacle. The setback didn't deter Brown, who in his 7-year-old son Altyrone Deno Brown thought he had the next Michael Jackson. Hearing their voices today confirms that Brown was on to something.

A confluence of greed, paranoia and disorganization prevented Bandit from becoming anything beyond a home-brewed fantasy. Brown died without fanfare in 1990, soon after which one of his sons angrily pitched the label's master tapes, records and notes into the alley. Numero began to reconstruct the Bandit legacy on the strength of one important clue: a phone number.

Persistence pays

The label initially found a phone listing in the white pages for another Arrow Brown, a nephew who put it in touch with a relative who after months of resisting what Shipley describes as borderline phone harassment gave him contact information for Brown's daughter Tridia. She held the clues to the music and histories. Yet persistence has its price -- from start to finish, the process consumed a year and a half.